My dearest favorite scones,

You are so fluffy and light, and I love your for it. I really do. You always put a smile on my face on a grey day, or a sunny one. You play well with my favorite fruits. My friends comment on how great you are, and ask me to share you with them. I still remember the giddy first days of loving you, when I brought you to my friend’s going away to London party. You fit in so well, and I just wanted to gobble you all up. I couldn’t keep my hands off of you.

But I have a confession. Over the past few years, my eyes have, on occasion, strayed. To scones with a little more substance. Scones that are a bit more hardy. Scones with a depth of flavor. Scones that are a bit less simple.

The moment I saw these certain buckwheat cornmeal scones and I was taken in. I must have had too many spoonfuls of the strawberry rhubarb jam that was simmering away on the stove top. I didn’t know what I was doing. Before I could come to my senses, my hands were sticky with dough. I had crossed the line.

June 5th was National Doughnut Day. Did you make doughnuts?

I was out of town, so I sadly missed it this year, but I’ve been making up for it since I’ve been home and getting very excited about the upcoming launch of Doughnuts! Did you know it comes out on October 1st? Did you know you can pre-order it on Amazon now?

Can I tempt you with a sneak peak of the book?

How about, to tide you over for a bit, you try making vetkoek (which translates to fat cake)?
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Are you a cookbook person? I am. Actually, more specifically, I am a book person. I love books. I love bookstores. I love books on shelves. I love book covers. And cookbooks, especially those with beautiful photography, are really one of my biggest weaknesses. But I have to tell you that my cookbooks have been extremely under used, and I’m quite embarrassed by it. Because as much as I love books, finding one specific thing out of many, many books is too hard. It’s just so much easier to grab my laptop, fire up google or even better, food blog search, and find a recipe that is exactly what I’ve been looking for. So the books, sit there, on the shelf, untouched. It is too sad.

I guess it must have been a couple of years ago, I had a crazy thought to build a website to help me start actually using my cookbooks. The point of the site would be to let people create a simple catalog of the cookbooks that they own to help them search through the recipes in those books. Anyone using the site could enter the recipes from one of their cookbooks and then be able to search it from then on out. The scale of the web would mean with enough users, each person would really only need to spend time entering one or two of their own cookbooks, and before long, there would be a very good sized catalog. Or, if all of that failed, at least I’d have a site that I could enter my books and search them.

So, in fits and starts, I eventually built it. It’s called GobbledyBook, and it’s free for anyone to use. I’ve kept kind of quiet about it because, to date, just about the only person who has used it has been me and it’s always a little nerve wracking to have other people start playing with your baby.

I’ve used it quite a bit already. In fact, I’ve entered over 4,500 recipes in more than 40 of my cookbooks. And even though that is only a small part of my cookbook library (yes, I am one of those freaks), it’s already come in handy to help me find the right recipe and actually cook from my cookbooks! Woo Hoo!

The basic scenario is pretty simple. Say, I want to make some bread pudding. I know I have a lot of bread pudding recipes in my cookbooks, but which ones? I’m sure that Donna Hay has a recipe, but I own 6 of her books. With GobbledyBook, I can simply type bread pudding into the search box, and it shows me 26 recipes out of my cookbooks and what page the recipe is on (Donna Hay has a Marmalade Bread and Butter pudding in Modern Classic Vol. 2, page 146, by the way). You can also see a full list of ingredients for the recipe as well as comments. (To actually cook the recipe, you have to go to the cookbook… I’m not trying to steal from cookbooks, just make them easier to use).

Or, maybe I need to bring something gluten free to a pot luck? I can browse all gluten free recipes, and then narrow down the selection by what ingredients I have or the type of food I like to cook, like Italian. I can limit the search to just cookbooks I own, or any cookbook that has been indexed. Then, I just go grab the book off of the shelf (or order it from Powell’s or Amazon!) and get cooking.

It’s also been wonderful for helping me figure out what to do with the ingredients in my market basket each week. Once I get tired of my old standards, I just plug in a couple of ingredients and see what other dishes I can make. Like, for example, this Swiss Chard Frittata that I made for lunch today.

Actually, this is a combination of two recipes… a basic baked frittata and a swiss chard tart recipe from Sunday Suppers at Luques. I didn’t quite have all the right ingredients for the tart, but I did have (most of) the makings for the pine nut relish that tops it. So, keeping with the basic seasonings of the tart, I skipped the crust, bumped up the egg and turned it into a lovely (and gluten free) lunch treat (recipe below!)

Anyway, back to Gobbleybook. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one with the problem of using their cookbooks, or the idea to solve it. Late last year, another site launched called Eat Your Books. With a slightly bigger staff (than my 1, so anything is bigger!) and interns helping out with the data entry, their catalog is significantly bigger already. Good for them! I’m sure if I hadn’t spent the last couple of years building my own site, I would totally sign up.

There are some differences between GobbledyBook and Eat Your Books though. First and foremost, GobbledyBook will let you catalog your own books, so you don’t have to wait for someone else to add your book. You can just do it yourself (and you’ll most likely find a few great recipes to bookmark along the way… I know I have).

GobbledyBook is also free to use. There are no sign up fees or subscriptions fees, and it is my intention to keep it that way. You sign in with your Facebook account, and you are good to go.

GobbledyBook also lets you enter the data the way you want to and the way the recipe is written. If the recipe calls for spring onions, you enter spring onions. Behind the scenes, we’ll match up ingredients that are the same (so if you search for scallion, you’ll see recipes for green onions as well. Search for soup and you’ll see recipes that are bisques). I’ve had numerous searches on Eat Your Books fail because I didn’t use quite the right search term.

So, if you find yourself wanting to make your cookbook library a little easier to use, I hope you’ll give GobbledyBook a try and enter a cookbook or two. To entice you a bit more, I’m giving away a $50 gift certificate to your choice of Powell’s or Amazon to the first person to catalog 500 recipes!

PS: GobbledyBook is a labor of love. It’s been a long time since I’ve done any “real” software development, so you may, at times, find a glitch or two. If you do, I hope that you let me knows so I can keep making the site better!

Do you suppose I could persuade you into believing that I am very, very early with my St. Patrick’s Day posting? I’m like one of those Guinness clocks they have in Irish pubs that roll over and start the count all over again the moment the clock ticks over from the 17th to the 18th. The truth is, I hadn’t come up with anything I really wanted to post about to mark the occasion. I was too late to cure my own brisket for corned beef, plus I’d already done that here. I thought about making soda bread, and was intrigued by one made with whole wheat flour, but I usually find the bread rather bitter, so I decided to forgo it.

It wasn’t until St. Patrick’s Day Eve (I’m making up new holidays here), when I was thinking about what muffin recipe I would make for the next morning (for a private food styling & photography lesson… a fresh batch of muffins is a great way to start shooting!) that I came across a recipe for a traditional Irish Apple Cake. Oh, the wonders of the web. Who knows if there really is such a thing as a traditional Irish Apple Cake, or if so, if this one is it (although the recipe note certainly makes it sound like it could be, and the author has quite a bit of book cred). I really didn’t care, it’s the one I found, I had all the ingredients and it looked simple enough. But I still wasn’t planning a post around it or anything.

As it turns out though, I love this recipe and really do want to share it. So, post St. Patrick’s day or not, here it is.

My first batch, I made as muffins. They were all lumpy with apple chunks and with a super moist, fluffy crumb. They were so good, I threw another batch together to take over to a friends house for dessert later that same night, and Cole claimed one to set aside for breakfast the next morning. Smart girl. I wish I had done that too. Instead, I just whipped up another batch, but this time in cake form. With a drizzle of Bailey’s Irish Cream glaze (ie, powdered sugar with Bailey’s mixed in slowly until it is just the right consistency). So maybe it’s too late for the holiday, and perhaps it isn’t even that Irish. But, it is undoubtedly delicious, so I do hope you indulge.

There is nothing new here today. I’d love to give you a recipe that I haven’t given you before, but I’m afraid I can’t. My grand ideas of trying something new last week failed and I decided to stick with a good old favorite. Muffins, nice and easy. Because when isn’t a good time for a muffin?

I don’t even have a new muffin recipe for you either. When it comes down to it, I just love the one I always make. I toy with the idea of trying othes, but in the end, I always come back to the one from Seasonal Kitchen that I used for my Muffin-mixed Berries which are so loaded with fruit that the muffin is just a mere hint of shape and crust. Boring, maybe. But I do hope you give it a try anyway because I think you’ll find you’ll come back to it again and again as well.

Instead of my usual flurry of berries, I swapped in diced pears, cranberries and a touch of orange zest. Nothing new really… it’s still just fruit and batter… but oh my lord, these are some muffins. The pears melt into the batter and the cranberries give the perfect tart balance to the pear’s buttery sweetness. This time around I also used superfine sugar and butter (instead of the coconut oil and brown sugar). If I had thought of it, I would have also sneaked in some toasted pecans.

What’s your favorite muffin recipe?